Named one of 2009's Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com, Castro has recently completed a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and is working on a novel, The Desire Projects. She’s also revising a scholarly book about the American Jazz-Age writer Margery Latimer, a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and an early feminist innovator who died in childbirth in 1932, whose work Castro discovered in graduate school while researching Latimer's husband, Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer. Castro is also developing a collection of essays by various writers on the ethical dilemmas of writing about family, “Any Number of Old Ladies”: Writers Revealing Family.
Castro was born in Miami in 1967 and adopted four days later by a Cuban-American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She grew up believing in what Witnesses call “the Truth” and going door to door, but she ran away at fourteen when the home became abusive, finally leaving the religion at fifteen. On her own from the age of sixteen, she raised her son, born when she was a college junior, while finishing school and earning her graduate degrees. Raised to believe herself Latina, she found her birthmother at twenty-six and discovered that her actual ethnic background was quite different. In The Truth Book Castro writes about religion, violence, adoption, ethnic identity, and her father’s suicide, as well as the warmth, beauty, humor, and passion for reading that sustained her.
She earned her B.A. at Trinity University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in literature at Texas A&M University. After graduate school, she worked for ten years at Wabash College, one of three remaining all-male private liberal arts colleges, where she taught memoir and fiction writing, race and gender issues, women's literature, literary modernism, Latina literature, and the Harlem Renaissance.
In 2007, she joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is currently an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Ethnic Studies. She also teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Boston.
An award-winning teacher, she has published articles on innovative strategies for the college classroom, and her published literary scholarship focuses on experimental women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries such as Jean Rhys, Meridel Le Sueur, Sandra Cisneros, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Margery Latimer.
Committed to broadening the reach of higher education to communities in need, she has offered free courses to at-risk teenagers, victims of domestic violence, and survivors of sexual assault, and for several years she ran the biannual Creative Writing/ Creative Teaching conference for Indiana high school and middle school teachers. She has also taught in the Clemente Course, a free program that takes a college-level, for-credit humanities curriculum to low-income adults.
She lives with her husband in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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